


Within Rights

by runawaykael (garnetmantle)



Category: Arsenal - Fandom, DCU - Comicverse, Titans - Fandom
Genre: Early Work, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-12-31
Updated: 1999-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 12:22:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnetmantle/pseuds/runawaykael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It can never happen to me," except when it does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Within Rights

A casket shouldn't be that small.

Not that he'd ever been around a casket that didn't disturb him. The life he led -- hell, the friends he made -- just didn't lend to quiet death in bed. He wasn't sure he'd ever laid eyes on one of those solemn, dark boxes, that it didn't scream at him of years cut short, of all the promises life could hold for the strong, and the smart, and the daring, going forever unrealized. He never had been poetic, but when you lived with death on the other side of one minute's bad work for as many years as he had, there were times when you thought about it. Titans shouldn't die young. But of course it would be more likely them than anyone.

His own thoughts had always been more for what it really meant in this reality, rather than what lay after. A philosopher was something else he'd never been, so Where We Go From Here had been a question he left for other people. Maybe those with less to atone for, less to be judged for, found it easier to think on what their final fate might be.

Where do people go when they die? "Away from me" had always been as much as he knew. And even though that hurt -- God. _Ollie_. -- sometimes hurt so bad he knew not even the once-familiar glow of the heroin could've eased it, it was still simpler than pinning his hopes on meeting again in some nebulous future. Easier. Or not meeting them, when he might have, if he'd been a better man. The heroin would have killed him by now if he'd let it take his pain away. So much easier. Not to be alive to be standing here today.

A casket shouldn't have to be that small.

Daddy's guns were never loaded. Ever. He'd never failed to account for every bullet, every time he came in. His daughter was safe in the home he made for her. Always.

Not everybody's daddy was that careful, apparently. Guns weren't safe things in some little girl's houses. Not every bastard made deadly weapons safe toys for his child.

But how was a four-year-old supposed to know that?

Damp ground was under his knees. He was... he'd been... standing under the tree. Fifty feet from the... from her . Not far enough. Never close enough again. The looks the Family were giving him had stopped with the beginning of the service. So much in those looks, such a whirl in all those eyes. He hadn't tried to meet them, or decipher it.

_~"Spend the night with Holly, Daddy, please?"~_

Holly's daddy was someone he knew. Mr. Wallace. Solid family man. So solicitous of the child being raised without a mother, without siblings, by the young man with the attitude. And so easy for him, to take those not-quite judgmental vibes, to give Lian something she wanted.

Police Officer James Wallace. So sure he knew how to keep his family safe, by keeping the weapons where they could get to them.

 ** _Fifty times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder._** Statistics. Lines in text, words on T.V. Those only applied to the ignorant, and everyone who heard or saw them was wise enough to know it.

 _ **It could never happen to me.**_ People who were above the numbers. Above all the rules, who beat all the averages. People he'd lived with all his life.

 _He_ was the man who'd known he was too good to need to worry. The dangers that civilians considered were no threat to the trained and the sharp and the experienced, to those who were the law. He had that in common with Mr. Wallace, just that, with the officer standing with the other mourners, crying real tears with _his_ little girl in his arms. To kill the man from fifty feet would take less than the full flick of his wrist. Another man just like him, too good to be a statistic. Who knew it would never be his mistake -- he was too careful. Who knew it would never be his child -- he would protect her.

And both of them had been right, of course. Nothing they'd done had endangered their daughters. Except that one had been taught not to fear, and one had been shown where a box was. Two fathers, and neither of _them_ were _**statistics.**_

A machine began to whir, dark wood covered in flowers lowering slowly beneath the ground.

Lian would never be anything else again.

He heard a distant tearing sound as fingers made strong on the bowstring ripped through deep-rooted grass.

No, a casket just never should've had to be that small.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by one panel in an Arsenal comic -- can't find the number, anyone know? -- that provokes Black Canary into comment on Roy's ammunition protocol.


End file.
